The Real Stumbling Block

The
Gospel of the Kingdom of God, as preached in the Bible, is declared in 1
Corinthians 1:22-25, to be a “stumbling block”. The message given to us through
the Bible does not hide from the reality of this difficulty of belief. Where
other worldviews might downplay the problems within their respective systems,
the Bible is uniquely forthright about that which is hard for us to understand.

Logically, the existence of a difficulty in a worldview
message is not sufficient to reject it. That may be a sign and it is worth
sincere examination. Usually, nothing worthwhile is easy. G.K. Chesterton
wrote: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been
found difficult and left untried”.

It is one thing for a worldview to be difficult because its
truths are profound and complex, it is another for a worldview to be incoherent
or ‘deep and mysterious”. Many have pretentious ideas and contradictory sentiments
wrapped in sophisticated packaging

It is true that there are difficult doctrines in
Christianity, such as the Trinity, the incarnation and Christ’s substitutionary
atonement. But the primary problem with the Gospel, arises from its indictments
of the human heart and its proclamation that humanity is incapable of saving
itself. The Gospel says that every person is spiritually dead and we can do
nothing in our own strength about it. Only the saving work of Christ can make
us alive to God. To humanity, this means we cannot rely on ourselves to make a
better future. This is the real ‘stumbling block’ –people hold on to their own
merit and refuse to acknowledge the Creator.

In secular humanism, unreliable humanity is their only
choice for improvement, as in that worldview, there is no alternative. As a
result, frustration arises when crime rates keep rising, promises are broken
and treaties violated. Cultures persist in their hatred of other peoples.

Embracing the God who gives so selflessly, changes the
follower of Christ from a self centered person to a selfless one. This is
one effect of what the Scripture calls ‘sanctification’. It is a process by
which the Holy Spirit floods the life of one who puts their trust in the Lord
Jesus and transforms that life.

To be sure, that follower of Christ can still sin, as we are
living in this fallen world, but this sanctification process gradually (in many
cases, dramatically) changes that person into one who believes and trusts in
God and genuinely tries to live sinlessly. Paul refers to this transformation
as becoming ‘a new creation’ and Jesus calls the beginning of the process ‘born
again’.

In other worldviews, people suffer from the impure
reflections of those deities and atheism has only unreliable humanity to
support it. God is the selfless moral example, as demonstrated at Calvary. When
our sanctification causes us to reflect God’s selflessness, we are on the way
to more perfectly reflecting the true image of God.